The City of Marlin Works and Emergency Services Department embarked on a Best Practices Program to transform their Water and Wastewater Services Division into a competitive public business. The goal of the this program is to re-examine existing functions and operations and to identify and implement "best practices" that improve the delivery of services as a business-driven, public utility. A focus on performance assures that these practices are measured and continuously improved.
Any performance management system provided would need to provide at least these high level objectives:

• Provide information relevant to operators, middle management and executives in both tabular and graphical form
• Provide easy navigation tools to find the various pieces of information needed by its wide variety of users
• Accept information in real time from process control machinery
• Support security control to protect sensitive information
• Be scalable to support large numbers of datapoints (currently 3000) each entered on an hourly or a daily basis
• Be configurable and modifiable by non-programmers

The system has met or exceeded all the requirements.  The implementation (consisting of 8 major systems, including ARM), provided the ability to increase efficiency:

To date, cumulative cost reductions of more than $65 million ($Canadian) have been realized and reflected in the 2002 budget, and annual savings are expected to reach $36 million per year upon full implementation of the project. Cost reductions come mainly through reductions in payroll, energy, chemicals, and parts.